Generally speaking, decorative laminates useful as surface coverings for floors are well known in the art and have achieved broad use in both domestic and commercial environments. For example, decorative laminates in the form of sheet material of a resinous polymer composition, e.g., polyvinyl chloride, on a suitable substrate, e.g., a fibrous backing sheet, have been used for many years as sheet flooring. A goal common to all manufacturers of sheet flooring is to provide flooring products having appealing surface decorative effects that are both attractive from an aesthetic viewpoint and useful from a functional standpoint. To illustrate, many methods and processes such as mechanical embossing, chemical embossing or inlaying have been utilized to provide contrasting surface finishes and thereby impart decorative effects to the sheet flooring. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,000,754, 3,121,642 and 4,298,646 each discloses different techniques or means for making floor-covering products such as floor tiles or sheet flooring having decorative surface effects.
Mechanically embossed textures often require adjusting during the process of forming the flooring. For example, mechanically embossed textures may not be desirable in chemical grout lines of the flooring tile design. Thus, the mechanical texturing of the grout lines must be adjusted out of the grout lines. Presently, the human eye is used in manufacturing lines to adjust the amount of mechanical embossing texture on vinyl sheet flooring. This subjective method is a leading cause of variation from run to run and operator to operator.